


i miss you sideways daily

by amillionsmiles



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Gen, I refuse to believe that her mom didn't at least know about her sneaking into the Garrison, Pidge backstory/character study of sorts, lots of family feelings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-26
Updated: 2016-07-26
Packaged: 2018-07-26 20:05:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,073
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7588216
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/amillionsmiles/pseuds/amillionsmiles
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“I know how it is,” she sighs fondly, snatching up the empty plastic bags from the table and throwing them in the trash as they exit the cafeteria. “The three of you just zoom off to your own little world sometimes.”</p><p>“As long as we come back, right, Mom?” Katie teases, already thinking of next year, when she’ll don the orange and white uniform as well.</p><p>Her mom smiles, rising on her toes to kiss Matt’s cheek, pinching Katie’s side with her other hand.</p><p>“As long as you come back.”</p><p>(or: Katie and Pidge and her family. Before, after, and from now on.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	i miss you sideways daily

**Author's Note:**

  * Translation into Русский available: [Каждый день я по тебе скучаю вскользь](https://archiveofourown.org/works/7875010) by [timmy_failure](https://archiveofourown.org/users/timmy_failure/pseuds/timmy_failure)



_“Sideways because I have to beam my love in all directions, hoping it bounces off something and eventually finds you.”_

_—Richard Siken_

 

 

**6.**

The engineers called it a _marvel,_ a _feat._ The media said _a whole new frontier of exploration,_ an _unprecedented display of human curiosity and determination._

Katie Holt stands in front of the Kerberos mission launch site, eyes the towering white shuttle, and says, simply: “Whoa.”

“‘Whoa’ is right,” Matt says, slinging an arm around her shoulders and tilting his head.

Katie smiles. Despite all the nights he spends mouthing launch procedures to himself and all his earlier visits to the site with Dad, Matt doesn’t put on airs at her awe. He’s there right alongside her. It’s what she loves about her brother—terrible vision aside, Matt always finds a way to look at things with new eyes.

“That giant thing, just for the three of you.”

“Yeah, wonder what we’re going to do with all of that… _space._ ”

“ _Matt,”_ Katie groans, pushing his shoulder. “You’re getting to be just as bad as Dad.”

“God, you’re right.” Matt wrinkles his nose, glasses rising with the motion. “Imagine what my sense of humor is going to be like once I get back.”

“Tragic.”

“Matt, Katie, turn around so I can take a picture!” calls their mother. The two of them spin, Katie’s cheek bumping against Matt’s shoulder like it has hundreds of times before, and in that moment she’s not counting the days until reentry or wishing she could go up there with Matt and Dad, she’s just thinking: _here. Here we all are, together_.

 **3.**

The maze covers most of the floor of Matt’s room, black tape and white cardboard, red flags positioned at the entry and exit.

“All right, here we go.” Matt presses the center button of the robot, green lights flashing as it chirps to life. Its wheels trundle slowly along, sensor wiggling back and forth as the robot makes minute adjustments, assessing the space around it. _Childlike,_ Katie thinks, blinking. Like a baby crawling.

It’d been weird, at first, trying to get inside the robot’s head. Navigating based on absences and presences— _wall, no wall_ —instead of just seeing and _knowing._ Matt had put a blindfold over her eyes and walked her through it: _keep your left hand on the wall, until you get to a gap. You and me, we’re lucky—sometimes we can see the dead end before it happens. The robot doesn’t have that luxury._

She almost misses it, when the robot finally makes it through. There’s a long pause where it just sits there and then Matt breathes, _“It did it.”_

Katie is already ten steps ahead of him, scooping up the robot and heading straight for the laptop so that she can reconfigure the settings and raise the motor speed: “Yeah, but let’s see if it can do it in under a minute.”

The robot restarts with a lurch.

And proceeds to ram straight into a wall.  

_“Katie.”_

“Whoops?” she offers, attempting her most innocent grin.

**5.**

The Garrison mess hall is filled with the exuberant chatter of cadets, but the corner that Katie’s family has staked out is quiet. Furtive.

Mom reaches into the paper bag she has hidden under the table and draws out five sandwiches zipped in plastic. Eyes bulging, Matt and Dad grab two each—crunchy peanut butter for them, the smooth one left for Katie.

“Oh my god,” Matt moans. “I missed these so much.”

 “You don’t have peanut butter and jelly sandwiches here?” Katie asks doubtfully.

“Not like your mother’s,” Dad replies. “The commissary tries but it’s just… _missing_ something.”

“I bet the secrets of the universe are stored between these two slices of bread.”

Mom rolls her eyes. “Stop being dramatic, you two.”

“Seriously, though.” Matt turns to Katie, this time. “It’s kind of weird, what you end up missing most when you leave home.”

“But you have _everything_ here,” says Katie, looking around. Friends and food and access to more tech than she could ever dream of. Dad had pulled her aside earlier this year and told her: _you can go anywhere, Katie, so don’t feel like you have to come here just because it’s where your brother and your old man are_ but Katie had just looked him in the eye and told him, honestly: “I’ve already started drafting my application.” She’s heard so much about these halls, could probably walk them in her sleep based on the stories that Matt recounts. “Speaking of which, you promised you were going to take me to the lab wing once renovations finished.”

“That’s our Katie, mind like a steel trap,” says Dad, wiping the crumbs from his sandwich off the table. “We can head over there right now.”

 _“Ahem.”_ Mom clears her throat as Katie, Matt, and Dad push away from the table, eyes already lit up from the prospects of _state of the art microscope_ and _we got a whole new set of spectrophotometers—_ “Am I invited along on this little field trip of yours?”

“Of course, honey,” Dad rushes to reassure. Matt and Katie’s eyes widen and they dart back to their mother: Katie fits herself to Mom’s right side and Matt stands on the left, arms draped across Mom’s shoulders.  
  
“Sorry,” he says sheepishly, chastised. “We got a little ahead of ourselves.”

“I know how it is,” she sighs fondly, snatching up the empty plastic bags from the table and throwing them in the trash as they exit the cafeteria. “The three of you just zoom off to your own little world sometimes.”

“As long as we come back, right, Mom?” Katie teases, already thinking of next year, when she’ll don the orange and white uniform as well.

Her mom smiles, rising on her toes to kiss Matt’s cheek, pinching Katie’s side with her other hand.

“As long as you come back.”

 

**7.**

_KERBEROS MISSON FAILURE: PILOT ERROR_

**2.**

“I know you’re not asleep, Katie.”

Resigned, Katie rolls onto her back, folding down the covers as she pushes herself up higher on the bed. The mattress dips with Dad’s weight as he reaches over to turn on her bedside lamp. 

For a minute, they just look at each other—and then Dad slips his hand under the pillow and pulls out Matt’s tablet, raising an eyebrow.

“Don’t tell Mom?” tries Katie.

“No electronics after lights out. Those are the rules, kiddo.”

“ _Matt_ doesn’t follow them!”

“Matt is older than you, and he _does_ still follow your mother’s rules, believe it or not. His bedtime is just later than yours.”

Katie crosses her arms, looking down at the bedspread. “I couldn’t sleep,” she finally mumbles.

“I wonder why,” Dad says dryly. “But no worries, that’s why I’m here.” He raps on the cover of the book he holds in his right hand.

“ _Cosmos._ ” Katie reads the faded gray lettering slowly.

“I figured, if my daughter’s big brain is going to keep her up at night, then my only option is to take advantage of that time and share as many meaningful and important works with her as possible.”

Now does not seem like the best time to disclose that she’d been playing _Space Bots_ on Matt’s tablet.

“This is your favorite book, isn’t it?” she observes instead.

Dad smiles. “It is.”

“What’s it about?”

“The universe. Out there,” Dad gestures around the room, “and in here.” He taps a finger against her forehead, then her chest.

Katie scoots over so that Dad can sit next to her, back against the headboard. “All right,” she says. “I’m listening.”

And she closes her eyes, letting her father’s voice wash over her, allowing it to take her by the hand and guide her through the dark.

_“The Cosmos is all that is or ever was or ever will be. Our feeblest contemplations of the Cosmos stir us—there is a tingling in the spine, a catch in the voice, a faint sensation, as if a distant memory, of falling from a height. We know we are approaching the greatest mysteries.”_

 

**8.**

private static void tryAgain()

{

            if (father == lost && brother == lost)

                        tryAgain();

            else

                        return;

}

 

**9.**

Mrs. Holt is a woman who has lost nearly everything. Mrs. Holt is a woman, then, who has nothing to lose when she faces Commander Iverson and says, levelly: “Next time, I would appreciate it if you didn’t manhandle my daughter when escorting her out of your room.”

The commander stiffens but doesn’t deign to respond, instead nodding his head at the two officers behind Katie, who finally release their grip. Katie jerks her arms away, bringing them close to her ribs as she reaches up and rubs her right shoulder.

There’s a truth to the phrase _fly into a rage._ It bubbles under her skin, the urge to shriek and shred, to take talons to the Garrison’s shroud of lies, to buffet them with all the righteous fury swelling behind her. 

But there’s a droop to her mother’s shoulders, a weight in her eyes that keeps Katie’s wings pinned, that keeps Katie silent as she marches, slowly, to her mother’s side.

“Your daughter is hereby banned from Garrison property,” Commander Iverson intones.

The twist in her mother’s mouth is slight but sharp. “I wasn’t planning on letting you all have her.”

They leave with their heads held high. It’s only later, once they’re in the beat-up old Jeep passing desert brush on the way home, that Mom asks: “What were you hoping to find, Katie?”

 _Our missing parts. Zeroes and ones. On, off, here, gone—_ “The absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence,” she blurts, remembering Dad’s arm pressed against hers, the roughness that entered his voice after he’d been reading aloud for a long time without water. “Carl Sagan said that. Just because there’s nothing on the feeds doesn’t— doesn’t mean they’re not still out there, somewhere; if I’d just had more _time—”_

“Katie,” Mom says, voice breaking, and then she’s pulling over to the side of the road, unbuckling her seatbelt and reaching over the center console.

Swallowing thickly, Katie buries her face in her mother’s shoulder. Inhales. Holds it until it feels as if she’ll create an entire galaxy with the expulsion of her next breath.

“They’d do the same for us,” she says after an eternity.

Her mother’s voice is an imploding star. “I know.”  

 

**10.**

Find: **Katie Holt**

Replace with: **Pidge Gunderson**

(Variables can change. So can she.)

 

**11.**

Pidge measures her life in _laters._

“Maybe later,” she tells Lance whenever he and Hunk invite her to hang out.

“Later,” she tells her roommate when he asks for help on the physics homework.

 _Later_ as in _after._ As in _after I figure out the truth._ As in _after I get my family back._

The rooftop is simultaneously the loudest and quietest place in the Garrison. Quiet if you’re escaping the rowdy cadets. Loud if you know what to listen for, and how to listen.

Pidge powers on her radio, covering her left ear with her headphones and punching in numbers on her phone with her right hand.

“Hey, sweetie.” Mom picks up immediately.

“Hi, Mom.”

“How is everything?”

“Good,” swallows Pidge, picking up the first strains of alien chatter. She puts her phone on speaker and sets it down so that she can jot down notes better. “It’s noisier than usual, tonight. Does—” She bites her lip, frowning. “Does the name ‘Voltron’ mean anything to you?”

“Never heard of it. Is that what’s coming up a lot?”

“Yeah.” Pidge flips back through her logs, frustrated. “I don’t know. I’ll figure it out.”

“I know you will. Tell me about your day, then. Did you get to do the simulator?”

“Yeah. We failed.”

“Oh, I’m sorry.”

“No big deal, Mom. It’s not even the first time.”

Mom laughs. “Goodness, I remember how frustrated your brother would get—”

“That’s the other thing,” Pidge says, voice going quiet again. “One of the instructors, he—he almost called me Matt, the other day.”

A sharp intake of breath. “Do you think—”

“I don’t think he knows,” Pidge rushes. “It was more like— he just said that I looked a lot like one of the cadets on ‘that Kerberos mission’ and I— I was scared, at first, because I thought that he suspected something, but afterwards…I was _happy,_ Mom. I was happy that someone besides us remembered.”

The line between them is hushed, while the susurrant _Voltron, Voltron,_ brushes against Pidge’s ear.

"Promise me you'll be careful," Mom eventually says.

"Promise," says Pidge, staring at the moon and wondering what it means that its fullness only makes her feel more empty.

 

**12.**

The Castle of Lions never sleeps. 

Its electric hum wraps around her like a blanket and Pidge relaxes into it, tries to harness it as her own. The healing pods fascinate her in particular, both for their workings and their contents.

She monitors the Galran prisoners’ vitals and runs through lists of questions in her head. _How often did they move you around? What were the prison conditions like? How long did most of you last?_

When the time comes, she must ask them clearly. One at a time. _“You’re rambling,”_ Shiro had said back on the boat, smiling, and Pidge had remembered practicing for her fifth grade science fair presentation, how Matt had grinned and said: _“Slow down.”_

It’s late but there’s no one here to force her into bed, so Pidge keeps typing, typing, typing away—

 _No electronics after lights out,_ she thinks, drowsily, as her eyelids eventually close.

**4.**

“‘An army marches on its stomach,’” quotes Dad at dinner, raising his fork. “Most commonly attributed to three different people. Guesses?”

“Napoleon,” Katie jumps in immediately.

“You took the easy one,” teases Matt from across the table, before adding, “Frederick the Great.”

“Last one. Sweetheart?” Dad calls toward the kitchen.

“Claudius Galen, chief physician to the Roman army,” comes Mom’s breezy reply over the sound of running water.

“Excellent,” beams Dad.

Meanwhile, Katie and Matt roll their eyes at each other, unfazed by their father’s obsession with dispensing knowledge through famous quotations.

“All right, here’s another: ‘If you get too worried about what could go wrong, you might miss the chance to do something great.’”

“Edison?” Katie hazards.

“Nope.”

“Churchill,” tries Matt, deadpan.

“Not at all! Do you two give up?”

“Just tell us, Dad.”

“That one’s a Samuel Holt original,” he announces proudly. “Pretty good, huh?”

Matt smothers his laugh by shoving in a spoonful of mashed potatoes.

“Yeah, Dad.” Katie kicks Matt under the table, and she’s only half humoring her father when she smiles at him and says, “It’s really good.”

 

**13.**

“You know, if you never get any sleep, you’re probably going to be stuck that height forever.”

“Hi, Hunk,” Pidge replies without looking up.

“Hey, Pidge.” He sinks down beside her, setting a platter on the ground. “Need a hand?”

Before, Pidge would have shrugged. Arms-length, guard up, _out of my head._

But this is _later._ This is her _after._ It’s not the family she was searching for, but it’s one all the same.

“Definitely,” she answers.

“Cool,” says Hunk, grabbing one of the tools and moving into place. He nods toward the platter of steaming goo. “I made us some food, too.”

“You’re the best, Hunk,” Pidge says, and means it.

 

**14.**

 

There are so many things to be afraid of.

A galactic empire ten thousand years in the making. A war, lost. A lion separated from its pride, possibly forever.

But as the colors of the wormhole blur and warp around her, Pidge glimpses, for a moment, the interior of a room. Dark blue wallpaper studded with glow-in-the-dark constellations. A checkered green bedspread. A little girl in purple pajamas and a father, reading:

_“Exploration is in our nature. We began as wanderers, and we are wanderers still. We have lingered long enough on the shores of the cosmic ocean. We are ready at last to set sail for the stars.”_

 

**1.**

“Hey, Dad, what’s trilateration?” 

“A big word.”

“Dad! I’m serious.”

“I know, I’m just messing with you, kiddo. Trilateration is how GPS works. You measure your distance from one satellite, see, which gives you the radius of a circle that you know you’re somewhere on. And then you do the same thing from two other satellites. Where all those circles intersect is your specific location. Three satellites give you a 2D position, four satellites give you 3D, and so on. The more satellites, the more precise. Does that make sense?”

“Yeah, I get it. It’s kind of like— well, like you guys are my satellites, in a way.”

“Hm, why’s that? Because you’re the youngest and we all have to hover around you to make sure you don’t get into trouble?”

“Very funny, Dad. I just meant— as long as I have you, Mom, and Matt around, I’ll never be lost, you know?”

**15.**

The heat hits her first.

Pidge pulls off her helmet, throat parched. Her own limbs are intact, but her lion’s systems are down, and she has to use her bayard to pry open the hatch. Outside, the air is sweltering, but it’s fresh, at least, and human-friendly per the readings from the analysis machine she and Hunk designed back in the Castle of Lions.

Cracked brown earth stretches for miles.

There is no place for green here.

But then she closes her eyes. Reminds herself that this is just one world of many. That there is a whole universe where Lance cracks stupid jokes and lets her take shots at him in return. Where Hunk hands her the next piece of equipment she needs without her having to say anything. Where Keith’s voice cracks on the word _family_ but he finds her later and manages to fit his mouth around the word _sorry._ Where Shiro knows when to pick her up and when to nudge her forward, mouthing: _Go._ Where Allura and Coran are still fighting. Where Dad and Matt are still alive. Where her mom is waiting, praying for them all to come home.

_The more satellites, the more precise._

_Three points._

Sand dunes to her right. A distant outcropping of rocks ahead of her. The Green Lion, nestled in its crater.

_Here I am._

_Good. And where will you go?_

“To find them,” she says, and starts to walk.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [i miss you sideways daily by amillionsmiles [podfic]](https://archiveofourown.org/works/13063782) by [Rhea314 (Rhea)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rhea/pseuds/Rhea314)




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